'Guild Wars 2' 'Mystery of Heaven' review and outlook, the new expansion pack will be revealed on June 7!

Preface

Hello everyone in the Guild Wars community!

This is Josh Davis, Guild Wars 2 game director. Last week’s content update was a major milestone for us – both technically and figuratively.

This marks the last major version release of "Guild Wars 2: Mysteries of Heaven" (SotO), and is also our first attempt at a yearly expansion update model since we first announced it in early 2023.

Mystery of Heaven - Review and Outlook

With the completion of the last content update for "Guild Wars 2: Mystery of Heaven", we can't wait to prepare Details of the next expansion pack revealed. Before everyone gets ready for the new Guild Wars 2 news coming next week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at the development of Guild Wars 2: Mysteries and some of the high-level lessons we learned from that experience that we've applied to The fifth expansion pack is in development.

You may not be able to learn about the specific gameplay, setting, or story of the next expansion in this blog post (that’s for next week), but you can better understand the tools we used during development. method.

Editor's note: "Guild Wars 2" officially revealed the release time of the next expansion pack - June 7, next Friday! However, according to the practice that the national server is a few days later than the foreign server, Society A may announce it earlier than this time.

Look Back

A quick look back. About a year and a half ago, we announced that we would be transitioning from our long-standing "World Live" model to a model of smaller, more frequent (annual) expansion releases. This is a significant shift, and this new direction comes from looking at the pain points experienced by players and developers. Our rationale for this change, and what we hope to achieve with this change, is simple but extremely important:

Provide content updates more consistently and in a timely manner.

Provide better support for the systems and game modes that make up the Guild Wars 2 gaming experience.

Let ArenaNet employees have a better balance between work and rest.

Now that we have completed a full expansion release cycle, I can confidently say that we have made significant progress toward achieving these goals. But as with all things, there is room for improvement – ​​both in terms of the content we offer and the processes through which we deliver it. Today, I’m going to focus on some of the things we learned about content.

Story

The conclusion of the Elder Dragon Saga in Guild Wars 2: Dragon Stand provides a unique opportunity to delve into another type of storytelling. We focused on a deeper narrative, primarily around the player character and the surrounding characters and environments. However, with Guild Wars 2: Celestials, our ambitions meant we were faced with more content than we could produce. We introduced many new characters and the plot was too complex for an annual expansion to reasonably fit into. This resulted in some character interactions feeling rushed and some storylines not being fully developed. More is not always better.

We learned a lot from this experience and gained a deeper understanding of the scale of the story within the new release structure. In the next expansion, we'll be telling a more realistic story set in a new region of Tyria, focusing on local threats and the global discussion surrounding those threats.

Despite the many challenges Tyria faces, it continues to change. We'll let Najos and the Kryptonians enjoy their regained freedom, and the story will pick up where we left off in Guild Wars 2: Mysteries of the Celestials - continuing to explore the story of the Celestial Aegis and their murky morality. and their relationship with Tyria.

Map Design

In "Guild Wars 2: Celestial Mysteries", we have launched three new open world maps. The first two maps, Amnitas and Sky Islands, will go online with the release of the expansion in August 2023. The third map, Nayos, was released in our first quarterly update in November 2023, and expanded in our second and third quarterly updates, adding new playable areas and events content.

After playing high-intensity adventures in Nayos in recent months, it's clear that using a single map as the focal point for three versions is not ideal for players or developers alike. We initially made this decision due to capacity constraints and overlapping development schedules between expansions, but we've found some ways to mitigate these issues - both in terms of release structure and process improvements.

In our next expansion, the first two maps will be available at launch, just like Guild Wars 2: Mysteries of the Sky. However, the final map will be released in the second quarterly update and expanded in the third quarterly update - meaning it will be expanded in two releases like Podra Frontier and Rainforest Coast.

Not only does this give our team more time to develop the third map, it also means the story in the next expansion cycle will better utilize all three maps and take you back in time A familiar place in your adventure.

Although the first quarterly update after the expansion will not include the third open world map of the expansion like "Guild Wars 2: Mysteries of the Sky", it will There will be plenty of new content to keep you busy during this time – whether it’s in terms of story, open world content, or encounters. I know this is a bit vague (again, check back next week), but rest assured that the first quarterly update will contain some very exciting content that players have been asking for for five years.

How to play

MMOs are composed of many different game systems and content types, each playing a different role in the game experience. As games grow, they tend to accumulate more and more systems and features from expansion packs and the like, which... isn't much of a problem... as long as someone puts in the effort to maintain and update these systems.

Looking back at the history of the game, I think this kind of maintenance and upkeep is one of the things we occasionally neglect, and sometimes fall into the trap of releasing new features just for the sake of releasing them, even if they are incompatible with some of the ones that already exist Things overlap.

This is a question we have been mentioning internally, called "putting a hat on a hat".

In the past two years, we have paid more attention to the maintenance and iteration of the system and tried to avoid unnecessary expansion.

We pay more attention to maintaining existing game systems, and in "Guild Wars 2: Mysteries of the Sky" we even completely redid existing functions to make room for more modern solutions.

The Wizard's Vault is a great example of how successful we've been with this strategy, and you can look forward to a new system being introduced in the fifth expansion to provide you with a meaningful new way to time spent in Guild Wars 2, while taking advantage of the opportunity to greatly improve the player experience on related existing game systems.

All in all, we’re being a bit conservative with the gameplay in Guild Wars 2: Celestials – trying to stay within scope, planning and strike the right balance between risks. We solved a lot of problems in this area, which allows us to be more ambitious in the next expansion.

Don’t miss it next week!

Happy Moment

We introduced the Check Appearance feature in a recent blog post and briefly reviewed the impact of our approach to Guild Wars 2: Celestial World. Quality of Game Improvements Coming - At the end of the article we've included a sneak preview of the areas you'll discover in the next expansion.

We felt today was a good opportunity to take it a step further, so I'll give you an additional environment preview video.

Full-year content overview

On behalf of ArenaNet, I sincerely thank you for your continued support, enthusiasm and feedback! We know how lucky we are to have such a dedicated community supporting us, and we look forward to exploring more of Tyria’s secrets with you in the days ahead.

Thanks for reading! The next chapter of Guild Wars 2 is about to begin! I'm really excited about what we've created, and I'm sure you will be too.

——Josh Davis, Game Director

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